At a meeting in my library recently, one of my colleagues expressed her frustration that one of the First Year Experience (FYE) classes that had been her responsibility had slipped away without a library session. We try and get 100% of these FYE classes, but we never quite get all of them, so we all reassured her that if this was the first time that had ever happened to her, she was doing a great job.

“Yes, I know,” she said, “but I still feel bad for those students, like they are going into the rest of their college career behind the other students, without that experience of learning about the library.” I responded with my typical tact, “well it’s not like they missed their polio vaccination or anything.”

People laughed, but in retrospect I was afraid I might have sounded sarcastic when I was trying to be reassuring. I didn’t mean that my colleague was blowing things out of proportion. I had two other things in mind.

The more obvious meaning is that lack of library instruction never killed anybody. I think that instruction sessions can help students work better, smarter, faster when it comes to research assignments (if I didn’t think that, then why do it?), and I do think that getting them at the start of their first year of college is important in setting the tone for ther relationship to the library. But the lack of such a session isn’t going to kill them. Someone may have actual numbers that prove me wrong, but I doubt that missing a freshman library session makes a person more likely to fail a course or drop out of school.

The other, perhaps less-obvious meaning is that, unlike a vaccination, library instruction isn’t a one-shot deal. There is no way they can learn everything useful about libraries in one or two hours. Chances are, each student at our college has more than one classroom session with a librarian.

And beyond that, many students will learn more about using the library in ways other than formal instruction sessions. They will come to the reference desk or visit a librarian’s office on a professor’s recommendation. They’ll learn some things about research by working closely with a faculty mentor, or by asking other students for help. Or they’ll learn as I did in college, simply by being curious and puzzling things out on their own.

Library instruction for first-year students is important. But more important is a campus that provides multiple opportunities over multiple years for students to learn and explore in the library.